A High Speed Traffic Source for Web Traffic Simulation

Discrete packet level simulation of optical networks poses a significant challenge in that the number of events involved in the process are so large that the simulation times become unacceptably long. Given that 85%-90% of Internet traffic is based on TCP and that the protocol’s performance is a function of Round Trip Time (RTT) and the congestion in the network, it is necessary to include TCP in the simulation of networks. We use a Pseudo-TCP (P-TCP) protocol model that maintains the important functionality of TCP and sends a whole window of packets as one big packet thus reducing the number of events significantly. This abstraction at the transport level causes the simulations to run ≈ 28 times faster than the discrete packet level simulations. At the session level the source uses a heavy-tailed web-page sizes distribution that imparts the Long Range Dependent (LRD) character to the traffic. We show that the main traffic characteristics like Throughput (TP), Hurst parameter (H) and Mean Packet Delay (MPD) remain the same as that of discrete packet level traffic. The high speed traffic source opens up road for more realistic optical network simulations.